during a KPFA
fundraiser telephone interview Joe was aked who Jerry was, and what it was
all about. His response was "Jerry was a man who lived in New York City. He
lived in an apartment, alone and was very depressed; and what he did was
record his phone conversations, with everybody, for years. and when people
came over to visit at his apartment he'd record them, too. He bacame so
depressed he couldn't leave his apartment. His brother Mannie (who you also
hear in that show) would come to his place with food, to keep him alive;
and ultimately he died, a relatively young man in his early forties, of a
brain aneurysm. After he died, his brother had all these tapes, hundreds of
tapes of these phone conversations and he knew that his brother Jerry had
been a fan of my program and he thought 'Well, maybe Joe can use some of
this material maybe he'll put it on the air.' So he sent me a excerpts ...
and I found this material very compelling and decided to make a radio
series based on those recordings. So what you hear in 'Jerry's World' is
Jerry, who is now dead, and his brother Mannie who very much admired him...
and this girlfriend earlier of Jerry and then of Mannie and now she was
going out on her own, and her name was Meryl, and there was another woman
involved, but these were all tapes of real conversations and real life
being played out from various times in the life of a man who died rather
tragically."

comment: contains the "Joseph's POV" sequence from God Only Knows as well as that 'phone-preacher' business
from In The Dark programs A Natural Disaster
and Prayer:"Louder brother I can barely
hear you"